Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Maps in RPGs, As Inspired by Sean and Brett (Gaming and BS 212)

Sean and Brett are at it again. Once again there was a topic that came
up on Gaming and BS that caused me to go on an even longer tangent than I
normally do. Check out episode 212 of Gaming and BS for the full discussion.
This time Sean and Brett talk about maps, and that got me wanting to talk about
maps as well. Thanks again for a great show!

I think one thing that always gets tricky is that while it feels like a fun,
old-school thing to see how the player’s maps differ from the GMs based on how
they interpreted their descriptions, in some cases that literally saying that
the PCs, the characters in the world, misunderstood what they were personally
perceiving. While that works for intricate designs or camouflaged ninja deer,
something like assuming there are only two passages out of a room where there
are clearly three isn’t something the PCs are likely to do, but I’ve seen GMs
that will run with that because “the players weren’t paying attention.”

I honestly think that unless something is meant to be hidden or to be
presented as a puzzle, it’s the GMs job to make sure the players understand
their environment at least as well as their PCs would. If you are getting upset
that your players didn’t pick out simple details in your description of a
normal cavern, maybe your description of a normal cavern was too simple for
them to latch on to. A simply 40 by 40 room with three 10 x 5 archways cut out
of stone with no adornment isn’t really that memorable, so of course your PCs
aren’t going to latch on to that like they would if one wall was made from
corpses mortared together with some kind of congealed, slimy black substance.

Or, to put it differently, if something is suppose to be a simple
decision (do you go to archway 1, 2, or 3), don’t try to “gamify” the PCs
remembering what you said.

New School Mapping

When I was reviewing Esper Genesis, the 5e SRD d20 sci-fi game, I ran
across a passage talking about roles that people in a group could assume when
travelling, and how assuming those roles meant they couldn’t use passive
perception. I looked up in the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition Player’s
Handbook and realized that I had missed those roles in D&D the entire time
I had been playing 5th edition.

Activities are navigate, draw a map, track, and forage. Not all of
these always apply, but the way these roles are referenced does imply how those
roles should be adjudicated in 5th edition D&D. Navigating is about making
checks to see of the party gets lost when they go somewhere they haven’t been
before. Drawing a map is about to record the group’s progress which “helps the
characters get back on course if they get lost . . . no ability check is required.”
In other words, the implication is if someone is fulfilling the mapping role,
in character, if the PCs get back to where they were previously, they can
backtrack to places they have already been.

What’s interesting to me about this is that for the cost of someone not
being able to use their passive perception score, PCs should probably be able
to backtrack their way out of a dungeon unless there is some kind of mitigating
circumstance or supernatural alteration to the terrain after they left. I’ll be
honest, I know anyone can run their games the way they want to run them, but
there have been so many times I kind of wanted “permission” to handwave PCs
backtracking out of the dungeon (of course, if it’s taking them hours to get
out, I’m still all for rolling for random encounters for things potentially
jumping them while the backtrack--I just don’t want to ask them about every
intersection and multiple set of doorways on the way out to make sure they
don’t wander around in the dungeon forever . . . in real time).

Setting Maps and the Stories They Tell

When it comes to maps that I personally really love--part of my image
of the Forgotten Realms is the map of northern Faerun that came with the Old
Grey Boxed set. I loved that map, both the smaller scale heartlands version and
the zoomed out larger scale map. I also loved the functionality of the map just
being a map, but with a plastic overlay to make it easier to apply game rules
for travel based on the distances.

When it comes to maps and the Forgotten Realms--something major
happened to the Realms in 3rd edition that was never explained in setting, but
I think it had a more dramatic effect on the setting than people realize. The
designers condensed the map of Faerun by about a third. This was done because
they felt that it was a waste to develop parts of the setting that the PCs
might never travel to in a campaign, so everything should be within reasonable
travel distance to the heartlands.

I disagree with this logic, but beyond assuming that every adventurer
should go to every place in the Realms to make developing different areas
worthwhile, it also had the effect of making it feel like there was less
unexplored in the setting. Traveling from Cormyr to Waterdeep was by no means
rare, but it took time and effort on the old map. The entire reason the
Zhentarim establish their trade route through the very dangerous Anauroch
desert was because the straight line shaved weeks off of the long trip down and
around the middle of the Heartlands and over and back up to the Sword Coast
North. Less detailed nations were completely removed from the new map because
of where “constrictions” happened. It was faster to get from one side of Faerun
to another, and all of those spaces that might have uncharted settlements,
inns, and ruins were cut down.

While Faerun is still much larger than I think most people visualize,
and still has a lot of room for uncharted areas, the effect of making all of
the major settlements closer to one another made stopping in those “unnamed”
places less important, and reinforced the perception that every road was well
traveled and well documented.

One of my favorite approaches to maps in fantasy products lately has
been the maps in the Shadow of the Demon Lord products. Not only are many of
these maps less about detail and more about the impression and relative
locations of locations on a map, but many of them do not have a scale. While
some fans are bothered by this and have been spending a lot of time trying to
create a scale for some of the maps, I loved looking at the maps of the
Borderlands of Tear and thinking, “I want it to take about a week to reach that
side of the map, about two weeks to reach the middle, and maybe a month to
traverse the all the way to that side of it.”

Maps with a Really Big Scale

It has actually helped my enjoyment of some science fiction properties
to get an idea what the region of space looks like, where the media takes
place. As an example, the only thing I was really worried about when the
Expanded Universe became Legends for Star Wars was that the galactic geography
remained intact. I was less worried about the lineage of Mandalorian Houses
than I was just knowing that there were Core systems, the Inner Rim where the
Core worlds expanded first, a Mid Rim that is kind of the “working class”
section of the galaxy, a lawless Outer Rim that has to make do without much
help from the rest of the galaxy, and the Unknown Regions were all kinds of
mysterious weird undocumented stuff can come from. To me, seeing that map of
the galaxy helps me to understand what kind of stories to tell in the setting,
more than knowing exactly how many Jedi Knights were alive during The Phantom
Menace.

Even though I know the series writers didn’t have it as well developed
as we do now, I understand the politics of Star Trek better now that I know
what species lives in what quadrant of the galaxy, and it becomes more obvious
who the neighbors are and where the buffer regions are, including who lives
there. Maps can communicate and reinforce elements of a story in a powerful
manner.

Except for Firefly. The map of a trinary star system designed to
handwave not utilizing FTL in the setting makes my head hurt.